5/28/2014

When someone finds out I’m from Michigan, I am greeted with one of two responses.

1.)  “Oh, how nice!  Be careful here in the city!”

2.)  “Oh.  How are things over there?”

If it’s 1.), which, I must admit, usually comes from old women, it’s an easy enough response.  “Thank you, I sure will try,” I say, smiling reassuringly as they smile reassuringly at me.  I am a Midwesterner who must be protected from the dangers of the big bad city, and I accept their patronizing warning without any reservation of irony.

If it’s 2.), it’s a lot less easy.  “Things are looking up,” I say, smiling unassuredly as they smile unassuredly at me.  The subtext here is that they know that Michigan has been in some trouble, and they’re pleased to know that I have escaped it.  I do not know what to do with this patronizing congratulations.

I went to New York University for a panel this afternoon, and in a way, I was home again.  It had all the beautiful trappings of an MSU panel--distinguished guests given little time to actually talk, a moderator offering partially accurate paraphrases of their responses, and a Q & A period in which the shitty handwriting of three or four old people is translated into a stultifyingly obvious question.  Yes, if it weren’t for the much nicer auditorium and competent graphic design, I could have been in good old East Lansing.

And one other difference:  The way they talked about Michigan.  Because boy, did we ever come up.  See, the panel was about affordable housing, which means it quickly became about urbanism, which means it quickly became about cities, which means it quickly became an opportunity to play Mad Libs about the urban crisis and the only correct fill-in-the-blanks are Detroit and Flint.  These are sophisticated, brilliant people, but they talked about Detroit like the only things they knew about it were gleaned from a ruin porn piece in the Atlantic five years ago.  They played compare and contrast between the problems that come from the embarrassment of riches New York faces and the simple embarrassment Detroit does.

And you know what, they weren’t wrong.  And you know what, I’m from Plymouth, and it’s not that different from the way we talk about Detroit out in white flight suburbia.  But I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that they spent so much time talking about the unique and singular challenges of Detroit that they hardly even mentioned The Bronx, another city reeling from white flight and redlining and disinvestment and a poverty rate north of thirty.

What it came down to was this:  They were taking a 30,000 feet view of my anthill on a driveway with broad sweeping terms in order to make a point, and they didn’t have to.  In order to navel gaze about urban despair, you don’t have to schlep all the way over into flyover country.  You just have to take a 2 train a few stops further uptown than you usually do when you go to Lincoln Center.

i'm not that happy with this one, although i had a couple of good sentences and i'm certain there's some there there